'90s

While the clothes of the '80s were too flashy and fantastic for denim to gain much of a foothold in fashion, the ‘90s were ripe for a denim revival. The first wave of ‘90s fashion denim was dark and stiff, similar to the pristine denim of the '50s in all but its high price, which, for a pair of high-status jeans by a designer such as Helmut Lang, could be several hundred dollars.

Back in the mid-’90s, when Cacioppo was at Ohio State University (he is now at the University of Chicago), he and his colleagues sorted undergraduates into three groups—the non-lonely, the sort-of-sometimes lonely, and the lonely.